VITAMIN K2. WHAT IS IT AND WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

What is vitamin K2 and why isn’t it part of today’s conversation around holistic wellness?  Has it always been vital to good health?  At what point did our modern diet become deficient in K2 and why?  These are all critical questions to ask when exploring K2 and why it’s important.

Let’s start with the basics.  What is vitamin K2?  K2 is a fat soluble vitamin that works in tandem with vitamin D to escort calcium throughout the body.  Without it the human body becomes prone to osteoporosis, heart disease, tooth decay, Alzheimer’s, premature aging, and stroke.  Essentially, K2 is calcium’s vehicle to get to where it needs to go to do it’s important work in keeping our bones strong.  Unfortunately without K2, calcium ends up depositing in our arteries instead of our bones, leading to the multitude of health problems listed above.  Vitamin D’s role in the transit of calcium is just as critical but it’s important to emphasize that D and K2 are a team and winning the calcium game depends heavily on their synergy.

Vitamin D governs calcium absorption from the intestines into the blood stream but is not responsible for taking it where it needs to go, this is K2’s job.  Without getting too scientific, K2 activates the proteins that move calcium around the body and when our bodies are deficient in K2, this very important facilitation does not occur.  When Vitamin D is deficient, K2 is left without an opportunity to escort calcium away from arteries and into bones.  If D is abundant without K2, calcium never makes it’s way out of the the arterial wall and instead builds up there where it introduces a host of dreadful illnesses.

Here is an interesting article on Vitamin D and Vitamin D deficiency as it relates to hair loss.

I like using basic, practical analogies to describe complex systems.  Let’s say calcium is trying to get into the bones and teeth, a very exclusive VIP event.  Vitamin D opens the door for calcium and she enters the blood stream, where millions of other proteins, blood cells, and microbes are co-mingling.  This is not the VIP event that calcium is trying to get to, but nonetheless, it’s still an interesting scene.  Thankfully before calcium has a chance to get comfortable she is swept up by the dashing K2 and escorted to an even swankier shindig, bone (which is a lot tougher to get into) where she is welcomed as the guest of honor and is able to perform her magic of building bone strength.  In the unfortunate event that K2 no shows, calcium never makes it to the ball and instead hangs out in the blood streams until she literally hardens.  You’d probably become callous too if your date stranded you in the bloodstream after a long and arduous commute through the intestines.  It’s not quite this simple, but you get the gist.

So, if K2 is so essential why has it evaded mainstream science and nutrition theory?  K2 spent years in disguise, quietly veiled by it’s twin K1.  Vitamin K was discovered in the 1930s after a series of tests positively identified it as the nutrient required for blood clotting.  For decades researchers identified vitamin K in two forms; K1 and K2.  Unfortunately it took 70 years to determine that K1 and K2 were distinct nutrients with very different properties.  At first blood clotting was perceived to be their only role and K2 deficiencies went undetected if the subject did not show signs of some kind of bleeding disorder.  It wasn’t until 1975 that researchers at Harvard Medical School identified osteocalcin, the K2 dependent protein now known to play a critical role in drawing calcium into bones and teeth. Two decades later in 1997 researchers finally nailed down the two processes K2 was responsible for that were completely unrelated to coagulation; depositing calcium into bone and preventing calcification of arteries.

In the next blog post on K2 we’ll explore the discoveries of Dr. Weston Price, delineate some of the foods that are rich in K2, and discuss why K2 went missing from the modern, North American diet.  I’ll also post some helpful tips on how to make sure you’re getting enough K2 and list some yummy foods that are packed with this vital nutrient.

Until then…be happy, be healthy, and….

Breath, Eat, Thrive

Sofia